In 2005, Jean-Paul Brodeur suggested that police reform is assumed to proceed
through similar stages and at a similar pace across policing. Brodeur’s
argument, however, applies best to reforms in the paradigm of policing, such
as community policing (Zhao, Lovrich, & Thurman, 1999) or intelligenceled
policing (Carter & Phillips, 2013). Many reforms or improvements in
policing, however, occur in environments or venues that do not apply at the
paradigm level; yet, they should be recognized for their potential application
across policing. These police reforms may be found throughout policing and
applied in an “? la carte” fashion. That is, many police departments may find
that the different reforms or improvements attempted in other police agencies
might also be applied in their jurisdiction.
Some police reforms, while originally local in nature, receive broad recognition
and are then diffused across and integrated into many other police
agencies. For example, COMPSTAT (COMPuter STATistics) was promoted
by William Bratton; the program received public recognition and awards,
and was diffused across policing through these mechanisms. Unfortunately,
many police reforms that might be useful to a broad number of police agencies
do not have the benefit of a well-recognized and supportive leader, government
backing, or other social system. These reforms and programs do
not follow the normal patterns of diffusion (see Gayadeen & Phillips, 2014;
Phillips & Gayadeen, 2014); thus, their existence and application may be
unknown to most other police agencies. In addition, some “older” policing
reforms have had broad interest in the past, but their importance to police
agencies has waned or the topics have been minimized in the scholarship for
many years. When police agencies reexamine the possibility of implementing
older reforms, the attempts are often lost among the new or “trendy”
police reforms that are currently on the front stage of policing.